


Green and Grey

by avislightwing



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, And I'm not sorry, Families of Choice, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Alternating, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Trauma, definitely changed that last relationship tag, will tag the other characters as they appear
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-17 00:01:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16963971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avislightwing/pseuds/avislightwing
Summary: Fjord is mourning a father figure and a way of life. Caleb is mourning a family and a future. Now they’re both mourning a friend as well.Molly always was someone who brought people together, and this is no exception.





	1. All Hanging On One Person's Breath

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to _Green and Grey_ , a fic I’ve been working on for months (with varying degrees of success) and is finally here – a story about loss, guilt, and moving on. I do not have a posting schedule, as not all of this fic is written yet and I am still in grad school, but I know the shape and scope. Hopefully you’re in this for the long haul.
> 
> Though I’m putting a few general content warnings in the tags and will be putting warnings on each individual chapter, I wanted to start off with a list of themes that could be triggering that this fic will be dealing with. If these are triggers for you, please either be careful or do not read this fic. Take care of yourself! (Additional note: many of these themes are not inherently triggering, but in combination with the darker themes, they could be.)
> 
> Themes include:  
> \- Death, dying, and the grieving process  
> \- Injury and physical illness  
> \- Disability  
> \- Mental illness (PTSD, anxiety, depression)  
> \- Neurodivergence  
> \- Gender and sexual identity  
> \- Trauma  
> \- Abuse
> 
> If you have any specific questions, feel free to reach out to me on my Tumblr blog [@birdiethebibliophile](%E2%80%9Dbirdiethebibliophile.tumblr.com).
> 
> Enjoy.

__**I'm in a room full of people, all hanging on one person's breath.  
We would all vote him most likely to be loved to death.  
I hope he still wants it, but it might remind him of when,  
he aimed for the bulls eye and hit it nine times out of ten.  
That one time his hand slipped, and I saw the dart sail away.  
I don't know where it landed, but I'm guessing between green and gray.  
We thought nothing of it, but it still haunts him like a ghost.  
With all eyes upon him, except two that matter the most. (“Green and Grey”, Nickel Creek)**

 

 

_there’s always something about driving on a winter night._

_you turn on your headlights and turn up the heat turn up the music until the bass shakes the seats and you hold yasha’s hand over the gearshift because any minute you’re not touching someone else is a moment wasted, isn’t it?_

_where are we going? yasha asks you._

_you laugh. where are we ever going? you say to her._

_just taking a joyride after dark in a snowstorm, then?_

_you were the one who got in the car, you say._

_she smiles. fair enough, she says._

_we’re going to pick up some friends, you relent. they’re stranded at a party and called me, asked me to come pick ‘em up._

_nice of you, yasha says._

_you shrug. didn’t have anything better to do, you say. caleb refused to come, the spoilsport._

_it started snowing at sunset, flakes flying at your windshield in a stormgrey cloud. you can see out of the corner of your eye juniper, spruce, fir, dark green muted by coming night and dusted by the snow. you think it’s like a dream. you tell yasha so._

_everything is like a dream to you, dear._

_it’s getting dark out, and the roads are slick._

_fly, mollymauk, seabird. fly one last time._

_even you can’t stay aloft forever._

_remember we are stardust, and to stardust we must return._


	2. Come Away, Little Light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings: Death, car accidents, grief/mourning, drug mention

**Come away, little light, come away to the laughter,**  
**Show yourself so we might live.**  
**Come away, little light, come away to the laughter,**  
**To the ones appointed to see it through.**  
**We are coming for you.**  
**We are coming for you. (“Come Away to the Water”, Glen Hansard)**

 

 

 

_Five Years Earlier_

The room was dark, and it smelled like metal and cardboard and brine. It halfway comforted Fjord with its familiarity, the way it was the same scent that he woke up to and fell asleep to day after day. It was like the well-known movement of the ship, the heartbeat-sway rhythm that he’d learned to counterbalance with. It only caught you off-guard if you spent a few months on land, tripping you up and sending your legs and stomach reeling.

That was the other half – the half that filled Fjord’s lungs like he was drowning, smothering him and blanking his mind out. This was a dizziness, a head-spinning panic that was mostly induced by the man in front of him with the grey eyes and the buzzed-short gold-brown hair and the simple device clutched in his left hand.

“Don’t,” Fjord said, hands up and fingers spread as if to grab but not to hit. “Sabien, don’t. You don’t have to do this.”

“Kind of do, though.” Sabien blinked – slowly, distinctly, a motion that always drew the eyes to his face. Fjord knew well that look, that blink. He’d seen it on Sabien’s face since they were seven years old and Sabien was convincing Fjord to steal the quarters from their housemother’s wallet, lying sweetly when they were caught. “This whole shitshow’s rotten to the core. You ought to know that by now.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you should blow it up.” Sabien’s hand twitched, and Fjord froze. He had no idea how sensitive the switch Sabien held was. “Where’s the bomb, Sabien?” he asked calmly. “We can still stop this. _You_   can still stop this.”

“It’s one ship, Fjord,” Sabien said, tone dripping with a mockery even Fjord could recognize. “One fucking Navy ship. One fucking metal machine of death. What’s one ship, more or less?”

“Exactly,” Fjord said urgently. “What will blowing up one ship do? It won’t help. There’s a couple hundred people on here. You’ll just be killing innocents.”

“No one on this ship is innocent,” Sabien spat, and he took a step back from Fjord, further from the doorway, deeper into the shadows of the darkened room. “Every fucker on this ship deserves what I’m going to give them. Including the two of us.”

“Some of them didn’t have a choice,” Fjord said. “And what about Vandren? You gonna kill him too?”

“Vandren’s just as bad as the rest of them,” Sabien said. “You’re a fool for thinking otherwise. A fool who believes the lie that he cares about us – that he cares about _you_.”

Fjord flinched back as if stung. “Come on,” he said softly. “Sabien. Please. I know you. You don’t want to do this.”

For the first time, Sabien’s eyes dropped from their razor focus on Fjord’s. “I do, though,” he said. “You don’t know me, and you don’t get it. I do want to do this.” His eyes flicked back up, and for one odd, vertigo-inducing moment, Fjord thought they looked completely colorless in the darkness of the room. Colorless as a glass of water, but with nothing behind them to distort.

“Run, Fjord,” Sabien whispered. “You have to run, however you can. Sometimes this is the only way.”

Fjord saw the movement a second too late, and he could only get to the door before he heard the ear-splitting sound of an explosion.

Pain tore through his back.

He was sinking, sinking, sinking through ink-green water.

*****

The next thing Fjord remembered, he was in the hospital with no hearing in his left ear and an uncontrollable tendency to flinch and freeze at loud noises.

There were no other survivors.

 

_Present_

Mollymauk Tealeaf’s funeral was on a cold day in November.

It was a private affair; Molly hadn’t known many people – he’d left his birth family behind long ago, and the people he’d traveled and performed with more recently. As it was, there couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen people there, only one of whom Fjord recognized, and he didn’t really feel like saying hi to her. Jester was sitting with her shoulders hunched and her knit hat pulled low over her curly hair, giving off more _don’t-touch-me_   vibes than Fjord could ever remember getting from her.

Maybe this was the first funeral she’d been to.

It wasn’t the first Fjord had been to, but it was the first one in a while, and he’d forgotten how goddamn much it hurt, losing someone.

_You were too good for this world anyways, Molly._

The funeral was outdoors, and there was no ordained priest. Molly wouldn’t have wanted that, despite his fondness for the Catholic faith, and besides, Fjord would’ve been surprised if he’d have been allowed to be buried in a parish cemetery. He probably would’ve been annoyed by the somber atmosphere, honestly, but Fjord didn’t see there was any way around that. It was winter, and the snow made everything seem sharp and painful and also muffled, like silent tears. They’d set up a few folding chairs; they’d each said a few words that Fjord couldn’t really remember.

A quiet, skinny young man with ash-pale skin and long, dyed pink hair in a side cut – he’d introduced himself as Caduceus Clay, the groundskeeper of the graveyard – had offered them tea and said a prayer over the grave in a language Fjord didn’t recognize. Irish, maybe. It sounded a little like Molly’s slight burr.

Yasha, Molly’s best friend, hadn’t been able to stay through their makeshift ceremony. They hadn’t even known if she was going to be able to come, only just out of the hospital as she was, but she’d shown up with her arm in a sling and looking strange without her usual dark eye makeup. She’d taken one look at the grave, tombstone-less because they’d barely been able to scrape together enough money to bury him, and let out a wordless scream that made Fjord think of stormy days at sea where all he could hear were the crash of the waves and the bereft cry of sea-birds caught in winds too powerful for them, tossed through the skies until they were dashed against the surface of the ocean. She’d dropped to her knees and stayed there for a long minute, kneeling in the snow, before getting up and walking off before any of them could stop her.

Fjord couldn’t say he didn’t understand the impulse.

He shivered, bringing his hands up to his mouth so he could breathe onto them. He was wearing thick gloves, but even they didn’t completely shield his fingers from the dry, biting cold.

Another man who’d stuck around, not someone Fjord recognized, was wearing gloves as well – fingerless, threadbare. During the service, he’d been sitting next to a skinny white girl of about nineteen with a medical facemask and a shabby green hoodie. She’d been fidgeting with a Bic lighter until he put a hand over hers, and she’d stilled for a few minutes before resuming. Now she was standing near Caduceus, and her friend was at Molly’s grave.

Fjord watched as the man crouched down and started writing something with his finger in the light dusting of snow over the freshly turned, frozen earth. Part of him said he should leave the man to his own grieving, but something – whether a morbid curiosity, or an aching wish to know someone was feeling similar pain to his – made him get up from the spindly folding chair and walk over.

 _Mollymauk Tealeaf,_   the man was writing. _Shine bright, circus man._

“You knew him?”

The man’s voice was startlingly soft, rough and low and coiled with a German accent. His words sounded heavy, like drowning, like a thousand gallons of water filling your lungs and dragging you under.

Fjord would know.

“Yeah,” Fjord said, and stuffed his hands back into the pockets of his down jacket. “Roommates, actually. We, uh…” He swallowed. “Yeah. I knew him. You?”

“We were friends, I think,” the man said. He was wearing a long coat, shabby as his gloves, over several sweaters layered on top of each other. A scarf, handmade by the look of it, was wound around his neck. He had badly cut brownish-orange hair that covered his ears, and scruff that went a few days beyond a five o’clock shadow. He smelled like cigarettes and sulfur. “He was kind to me. Kinder than I deserved. He… we…” He trailed off, then shrugged.

“Well. Glad you came. He shoulda had more people here.”

“It was the least I could do for him.” The man glanced up, and his eyes were grey-blue, and they looked tired, and they looked like the ocean during a storm. “I am Caleb, by the way. Caleb Widogast.”

“Fjord.” He didn’t bother offering a last name. “Who’s the kid?”

“Her?” Caleb inclined his head towards the skinny girl. “Nott. My sister. She was friends with Mollymauk as well.”

“You know anyone else here besides her?”

“Beauregard.” Caleb gestured at the other woman, dark face twisted in grief, besides Nott and Jester. She was standing about twenty yards away, leaning against a tree. Fjord had seen her punch that tree halfway through the makeshift service, then swear and grab at her bleeding knuckles. “You?”

“Jester. The one in the tights. She’s pretty broken up.” Fjord’s eyes dropped back to Molly’s grave. “So’m I, if it comes to that.”

“He was a special person,” Caleb said softly, reaching out and resting his fingers on the snow-dusted dirt.

“Aren’t you cold?” Fjord asked. “Your hands…”

Caleb flexed his fingers. They were long, and spindly, and red. “Not too bad,” he said.

“I have gloves…”

“I’m fine.” Caleb stood, crossing his arms over his chest and burying his hands in his armpits.

Fjord was startled to realize Caleb was only a few inches shorter than he, and that not taking into account his hunched shoulders. “All right. You goin’ to the, uh… the party? Wake? Whatever it is?”

“Ah. I suppose. He would want me to.” Caleb nodded at the grave. “He wouldn’t like all this silence and sadness. He liked life.”

“He sure fuckin’ did,” Fjord said. He closed his eyes for a moment, hit by a sudden wave of pain as the realization struck him that he’d be going home to an empty apartment tonight. No Molly making a mess of the kitchen or keeping him up with his parties or stopping him before bed to do a one-card tarot reading.

No Molly.

Fjord wiped at the hot tears that managed to trickle down his face with the back of his glove. “I’m gonna miss that colorful son of a bitch,” he said.

“He was the best of us,” Caleb said, and closed his eyes, head bowed.

“Caleb?” The girl’s – Nott’s – voice, creaky and uncertain, stuttered through the snow as she slunk over. “Are you all right?”

“Maybe. Come here.” With one arm, Caleb reached out and pulled Nott into him, the two of them huddled together, now.

Fjord, not wanting to intrude, backed away. On his way back to his seat, he stopped by where Jester was sitting. “You okay?” he asked gently.

“No,” she said. Her nose was red from cold and crying. “I just… can’t believe he’s gone. Maybe he isn’t. Maybe he’s going to appear and ask why we’re all so sad.”

Fjord settled into the seat beside her, unsure of what to do, how to comfort her. She was scrunched into herself, arms twisted into a knot across her chest, tight-clad legs wound around each other. “It’s so stupid,” she continued, voice clogged. “It’s so stupid, Fjord. The world is mean.”

“Yeah.” He sighed. “I know. I’m sorry.”

It was their fault.

 _His_   fault.

It was a stupid decision, but he’d never been able to say no to Jester, and she’d wanted to go to the party so badly. One of the kids who’d been coming to her storytimes for weeks now had been adopted unexpectedly, moving away, and Jester had needed something to cheer her up. So Fjord had remembered the party he’d been invited to by a friend of a friend, and said that he hadn’t planned on going, but sure, why not? He could bring Jester.

She’d been so happy about it.

He’d never seen her so unhappy, now, not even he was driving her up from the coast that first time. Two years ago, now. She’d been twenty and the entire back of his Jeep had been packed with her bags and she’d waved to her mom until they couldn’t see her anymore, and then she’d cried for a couple miles. This was different. She couldn’t call Molly on the phone when she missed him like she could with her mom. She couldn’t write him letters like she’d told Fjord she was going to do for Kiri. No one could, where he’d gone.

And it was his fault.

Fjord was suddenly struck with a desperate need to leave. He stood up abruptly, the chair tilting back. “I gotta – head out, Jes,” he mumbled. “Gotta head home, I –”

She nodded, still staring at Molly’s grave, where Caleb and Nott were still standing, and Fjord had a feeling he should be worried about her, but. But. He couldn’t be – not right now.

He couldn’t even go to the goddamn wake, he thought as he walked, head down and barely paying attention, towards the street where he’d parked. Couldn’t even give Molly that much. He unlocked his car with shaking fingers, slipped into the driver’s seat, and closed the door behind him.

“Fuck,” he breathed, and let his head tilt back to hit the headrest.

He couldn’t stay there forever, as much as he wanted to, so after a moment, he started the car, turning the heat up as high as it would go, and carefully navigated the snowy streets home. It wasn’t far. Ten minutes, maybe. They’d chosen the graveyard closest to where he’d lived. Where Fjord still lived.

The eleven minutes it took Fjord to drive the distance felt too short.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t been in the place since Molly’d died. He lived there – of course he’d been in it. But now Molly was in the ground, and there was a finality about that that felt different, somehow. At least Molly’s car wasn’t parked in front; it had been totaled, Fjord had been told. (It was his name on the insurance papers. Of course it was. The other option had been for Molly not to have insurance at all, and Fjord had not been about to let that happen.

Not that it mattered, in the end.)

The hallway was dark when Fjord walked in, and Fjord kept it that way. He stripped off his coat, stuffing his gloves in one of the pockets, and hung it on the hook beside the door. Headed straight for his room – or meant to.

Molly’s bedroom was right across the hall from his.

He stopped, halfway into his room. Molly’s door was still open a couple inches – he always forgot to pull it closed when he left, and the gaudy tapestry that hung on the back of it was always getting caught. Fjord could see the corner of the tapestry, now, black fabric and silver thread. He could almost imagine Molly’s sharp-fingered hand pulling back the tapestry, Molly leaning in the doorway (Molly had been a leaner; doorways, walls, people, it hadn’t mattered to him) and asking if Fjord was going to spend the entire evening in his room, or if he wanted to hang out with him instead. Fjord would smile and say he didn’t have anything better to do, and he would end up in Molly’s room, and they would listen to one of Molly’s albums – Hozier, maybe, or Saint Motel, or Liam Lynch, Molly’s record collection seemed endless – and Fjord would doze off against Molly’s shoulder, and Molly would nudge him awake because he _didn’t want you to wake up with a sore neck again, you’re practically an old man, after all, Fjord_.

The doorway stayed empty, of course.

Fjord would have to go through that room eventually.

Not today. Not when Molly still haunted it like a ghost, like a phantom feeling in the back of Fjord’s throat akin to the beginning of tears, like the smell of Molly that still hung heavy in the apartment (incense and marijuana and something like metal, or maybe blood), like a Molly-shaped space in the air that he couldn’t step through for fear of disappearing himself.

Not when Fjord was responsible for that empty space.

He shook his head and closed his bedroom door behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to listen to the songs I get the chapter titles from, I made a Spotify playlist for them, and I'll be updating it as I update this fic:
> 
> https://open.spotify.com/user/elsu0654/playlist/1bbuxb6pPNun34b4vRaRhu?si=_-FFmThhTlunrL9eN4Bm5g


End file.
